Paint on a crash test dummy shows exactly where the head falls during a crash test.

IIHS

The result of a head-on crash test between a 2009 Mercedes C300 an a Smart car.

David Booth, Driving

The result of a front crash test between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air (pictured) and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu.

David Booth, Driving

This 2009 Chevrolet Malibu survived a frontal crash test far better than the 1959 Bel Air it was pitted against.

David Booth, Driving

IIHS's added tests have forced automakers to improve structural integrity of their vehicles

by
David Booth | March 3, 2017

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Imagine you’re a young hotshot engineer. You’ve spent the last four years finite-element analyzing your company’s latest hot rod. It’s the latest in high-tech, a finely tuned blend of performance and comfort and, thanks in part to your long hours, the most exquisitely crafted automobile your company has ever produced. If you could, you’d engrave your name into its — to you, at least — absolutely stunning framework.

And then, in just 120 milliseconds — an eye-blink, really — it’s gone, your brand-new pride and joy reduced to a crumpled, mutilated hunk of junk. The bumpers are crushed, the fenders accordioned and, if the hydraulic ram was feeling particularly spiteful that day, the wheels literally ripped off. It is, the English language lacking a truly apt descriptor for the aftermath of an automobile collision, thoroughly mangled.

But here’s the thing, it’s exactly what you were hoping for!

Welcome to the wonderful world of crash testing, where “ultra-violence” is welcomed, pristine fenders and bumpers are destroyed daily and literally brand-new vehicles are sacrificed to the gods of collision. A bit surreal is a deliberate automobile crash. For one thing, it happens in a huge, gleaming white warehouse, empty save for huge, reinforced concrete blocks (for the cars to smash into), a flotilla of ultra-precise $100,000 4K digital cameras that shoot at 500 frames a second (the better to capture the minutiae of the destruction) and an entire office of engineers with an almost child-like obsession for smashing things. It is also — as I found out at a recent Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) small overlap test of Subaru’s 2017 Impreza — probably the only place you’ll ever see insurance agents absolutely giddy at the prospect of cars smucking into one another.

Child-like it may be, but the IIHS’s obsession is one of the major reasons the modern automobile is so much safer than its predecessors. (To prove the point, the U.S. institute’s showroom is decorated with a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air that was crashed head-on into a 2009 Malibu; one quick look at the relative destruction is proof positive sheer mass is no guarantee of safety.) According to the Institute’s statistics, “The chances of dying in a crash in a late-model vehicle have fallen by more than a third in three years,” at least in part because the IIHS’s tests have forced automakers to up the structural integrity of their automobiles.

That means cars now absorb more energy in full frontal crashes, B-pillars (the vertical beam that forms the rear of the front door opening) don’t shear nearly as often in side impact crashes (which still account for 24 per cent of all injuries and fatalities) and, in the latest of all IIHS’s myriad tests — the small overlap front crash — virtually all cars now pass, a huge upgrade compared with the 75 per cent that failed but two short years ago.

They are not upgrades automakers have always accepted graciously. According to the IIHS, those initial failures in the overlap test — the hardest test to pass, by the way — caused quite a tizzy among automakers; they initially claimed that meeting the new standards would need up to 100 kilograms of extra steel to reinforce the cabin’s safety cage. And, says Becky Mueller, one of the senior research engineers at the institute, one of the solutions to upgrade existing cars was simply adding a bunch more metal to their superstructures.

Longer term, automakers, despite their initial griping, have managed to meet the latest standards without increasing weight. So, cars like the 2017 Impreza — which passed with flying colours, by the way — manage to gain strength by literally building a “ring cage” of high-strength steel surrounding the cabin and its occupants. More importantly, claims Mueller, the difficulty of passing the small overlap test — having just 25 per cent of the car’s front hit the barrier stresses the cabin’s framework far more than a full frontal test — forced automakers to use ingenuity as well as engineering might. Recent automobiles — again, like the new Impreza that was just awarded the IIHS’s coveted Top Safety Pick+ rating — now design the front bumper so that it not only absorbs energy but also levers the car sideways away from the barrier, reducing the impact.

In the end, however, there’s only so much to be gained by adding additional crash tests. Indeed, Russ Rader, IIHS’s director of communication, admits the institute’s barrage of tests have “picked all the low-hanging fruit” in protecting occupants in a crash. Though it is looking at adding an oblique test — a small overlap test conducted at a 15-degree angle, which stresses airbags and seatbelts as much as the chassis — the IIHS’s focus of late has been in preventing accidents. Thus, as of 2014, to achieve the institute’s Top Safety Pick+, cars must have an army of electronic crash prevention systems. And, for 2017, having determined there’s far more differentiation between automakers’ headlights than previously imagined — testing revealed that BMW 3 Series headlights, for instance, are markedly less illuminating than a Prius V’s — passing an illumination test is part of a Top Safety Pick+’s latest requirements. Indeed, it was this last element that caused Tesla’s Model S to place last among four electric and hybrid vehicles recently tested: only the Chevrolet Volt and the Toyota Prius Prime received the coveted + rating.

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As to the future of crash testing, what seems to excite the IIHS’s engineers most is the prospect of having automobiles’ pre- and post-accident electronic aids working together. As surprising as it may sound, the sensors that initiate airbag deployment currently don’t talk with the sensors that predict a crash is about to happen. In other words, airbags don’t inflate and seatbelts “pre-tension” until something has smacked into your front bumper.

In the future, however, Mueller predicts that the same automatic pre-collision system that predicts you’re about to get into an accident (and currently automatically applies the brake to try to prevent, or at least blunt, the impact) will alert the passenger protection devices that a collision is unavoidable. The seatbelts, for instance, would be pre-tensioned even before front bumpers start kissing one another. Ditto the airbags, depending on the severity of the impact.

For now, however, automakers such as Subaru are just pleased when their products pass the IIHS’s current barrage of tests, including, as I witnessed, one once-loved and pristine 2017 Impreza thoroughly mangled in one extremely vicious small overlap test.